Libraries

Read to Win the War: 13 Vintage Posters Promoting American Librarieshttp://gizmodo.com/read-to-win-the-war-13-vintage-posters-promoting-ameri-1481958684
Ever since the internet came along, our relationship to libraries has changed dramatically. But recent studies show that these institutions—pillars of the OG sharing economy—are still viewed as essential to American communities. So it's fascinating to take a look through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's collection of posters and propaganda from the American Library Association, an organization founded in 1876 and still going strong in its quest to make libraries—both physical and digital—cultural hubs for learning and leisure.

A new Pew study finds that not only do Americans adore libraries, but a majority of us think they’re adjusting to new technology just fine.

Some 94 percent of Americans say that having a public library improves a community and that the local library is a “welcoming, friendly place.” 91 percent said they had never had “a negative experience using a public library, either in person or online.”

These sound like incredible approval ratings for any U.S. public institution. So I wondered: Just how incredible are they? How do other icons of Americana compare?

Yesterday here in New York City, the Library Lovers League protested changes at the New York Public Library, specifically speaking out against a proposal that would move many items in the New York Public Library collection to a storage unit in New Jersey.

Bibliophiles who took part in this “street theater flash mob” wore sandwich signs featuring book covers in front of the iconic Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The National Library of Norway is planning to digitize all the books by the mid 2020s.

Yes. All. The. Books. In Norwegian, at least. Hundreds of thousands of them. Every book in the library's holdings.

By law, "all published content, in all media, [must] be deposited with the National Library of Norway," so when the library is finished scanning, the entire record of a people's language and literature will be machine-readable and sitting in whatever we call the cloud in 15 years.

Libraries are Places Where Hippies and Junkies "Look at Drugs and Food Stamps" (on the Internet)

"The citizens of Lafourche Parish will vote Saturday in a ballot measure to decide whether to keep the money in the library system or pump it into the new jail. EveryLibrary, a pro-library non-profit organization, called the vote “the worst library election in the country” in a blog post. Supporters of the ballot measure say diverting $800,000 away from libraries’ budgets will help pay for the $25 million jail without raising taxes."

MOOCs give librarians new opportunities to help shape the conversation about changes in higher education and to guide administrators, faculty, and students through these changes. To assume this role, librarians must understand the MOOCs landscape. Numerous stakeholders will have an interest in the massive intellectual property that ultimately resides in libraries' owned and licensed digital repositories. Studying and adopting technologies to manage and monitor MOOC usage of library resources will be essential to controlling access and tightening Internet safeguards.